This week, Daniel Zalewski profiles the artist Christian Marclay, whose twenty-four-hour video collage, “The Clock,” has become “as iconic as Jeff Koons’s flowering ‘Puppy’ or Damien Hirst’s taxidermied shark.” Before he began working with video, Marclay’s subject was sound—more specifically, music. Zalewski writes, “Marclay liked to make something new by lovingly vandalizing something old. He remixed music—turning it inside out to foreground crackles and hisses—and he remixed objects that created music. He’d based dozens of projects on vinyl alone: scarring them with images, using a phonograph stylus like a lathe; melting them into cubes; piling them into menacing black columns. He even strapped a revolving turntable to his chest, as if it were a guitar, and videotaped himself whaling on a Jimi Hendrix LP. Marclay, a fixture of the East Village music scene of the eighties, was particularly renowned as an avant-garde d.j.—in the late seventies, he’d been one of the first people to scratch records in performance, treating the turntable as an instrument.” Watch a clip (above) of the artist performing in 1989, on the TV show “Night Music.”
Art Pick: Turning Tables
